Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism | Folding Ideas 

Funny sidenote: in 1.13 there was a bug, where villagers would continuously drop their prices, while they are swimming in water. This obviously led to people essentially waterboarding villagers until the prices were at their cheapest.

The leftism leaving my body the moment I boot up a building/terraforming game

The game does incentivize the zombie curing method by the villager giving the player permanent trade discounts. Unfortunately, this now incentivizes technical players to repeatedly have zombies murder their villagers, so they can cure them and get further discounts.

There is this mechanic in the game that works around having illagers (mobs that are like supposed to be a raiding party) if you kill one of them thats holding a banner, you get a debuff that when you walk into a village will set off a raid that you have to fight off or the illagers will kill all the villagers, when you successfully defend the villagers. They will give you presents and emeralds. and you can do this about as many times as you want. You can get rid of the debuff you want by just drinking milk, or turn that village into a raid farm by constantly saving the village from attackers you purposefully set up so that when they are safe again they will shower you with money. they inadvertently added war profiteering.

I hate when I accidentally recreate the *Spanish Empire* in Minecraft.

Minecraft's the only game that made think: "damn, I just accidentally drowned the wrong child" and only THEN did I have a good long think about myself...

“Let’s tame some cats” these few words lead to the deposition and oppressing of many people.

Things get even weirder in modded minecraft. I've seen people set up villager breeding systems that pull villagers into an insisting station. If they have useful trade goods, a belt takes them to a holding pen. If they have no useful trades, they are dropped into a grinder that kills them to extract resources from their bodies.

There's a minecraft modpack called regrowth, where you spawn into an endless wasteland with only burnt trees and dead grass, and you have to scavenge for a few seeds and use magic to bring trees, plants and animals back to the world. There are no ores in the ground, to get resources, you have to grow them with flowers. One of the mods in the pack allowed you to "build" cities out of nothing, but you didn't do the actual building. You brought stone and wood to the villagers, and they would build it themselves. A lot of these towns were based off non-white cultures, and while you could go in and change things after they were built, they looked really nice just how the villagers built them, so there was really no need to. I've played a lot of modded minecraft, but that one really stood out.

This man has clearly never seen villager trading halls and breeding machines

Yeah you are not fooling anyone, mister. The only reason you made this video was to show people your notre dame replica.

I recall a server owner describing my villager dormitory as a concentration camp.

"This would be so much easier if I could put villagers on leashes..." -"Hold up"

That's on you man, my Steve Minecraft lives in a hut in the forest

There you are, playing _Minecraft,_ when suddenly, you're Leopold II. You didn't ask for this, you didn't want this. But there it is. **Super Mario rock cover**

I recently came across a game called "Eco" which does an interesting job of addressing the environmental side of the problem presented in the video. It's another sandbox survivalcraft style game, but it provides consequences for your actions. Killing too many local wildlife will cause a population decline, and processing mined ores into useful metals creates toxic tailings which, if not properly stored, will leech into the nearby environment making the earth toxic, and preventing plant or animal life from growing there. It still leads the player into exploiting their environment to some degree, but forces them to at least consider the consequences of their actions.

Well it's not colonialism, you're just helping them out by constructing infrastructure that they could not… oh god.

reminder to everyone in the comments: "It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects."

“I’m not your dad” But why not

I do love that gaslighting villagers for cheaper prices after zombifying them and curing them is a mechanic

there's always been a strong current of humorous acknowledgement in playing minecraft, that everyone at some point suddenly realizes that they are recreating the horrific conditions of factory farms or something else horrifying. I think minecraft perfectly and unintentionally teaches you how easy it is to fall into these patterns if you just play it long enough.

But I asked first and he said: "Huuuuhhh!" so IT WAS A CLEAR YES! HE WANTED TO LIVE ELSEWHERE!

"Alternately you're going to need to acquire villagers from existing villages." oh no "It's just a matter of getting a villager near enough to the water that you can push them into a boat" oh noooooooo

I come back to this video ever so often and every time I do I agree with it a little more and have more to actually contribute to the discussion so here goes my 2023 addition. I am a black man living in a former British colony, so that informs my perspective on the whole colonialism and subjugation of a perceived subhuman population issue. The zombie doctor method has historically been the only way I ever tried to create a village from scratch. It never once occurred to me to take existing villagers from their village. If I had considered it I'm sure I would have immediately asked the question "Where would that leave the village?" I couldn't bring myself to disrupt their community- even if they're not really human, they're certainly human enough that I understood, even if just unconsciously, that taking villagers out of their society and bringing them to mine would do untold damage to the existing societies and be unsustainable if I ever wanted to make another village. You described the zombie doctor process in a way meant to highlight its difficulty, tedium and inaccessibility. I was, of course, aware of this, but again, I just unconsciously assumed "Hey, they're villagers, they're pretty much people, of course it's a difficult and tedious process". So when my cousin and I wanted to build a village, we developed a whole system for trapping zombie villagers, shielding them from the sun and sorting them by occupation (or at least coat colour). At one point we had a massive 5 storey complex that was basically an hospital with a zombie villager in each cubicle. When we went to the nether our focus was on getting enough resources to make our potions. It was a very elaborate operation, but never once did it occur to us that it was too much work to get our own actual villagers, because again, they're pretty much people, of course it's hard. Before when I watched this video I never really related to those people you described who, being from different cultural backgrounds, played video games in fundamentally different ways. But now that I remember all the things I used to do when I played Minecraft with my cousins and sister back in the day, it seems obvious that I am also part of that tradition. Once when we were in a village we had found, my aunt, (I assuming hearing our conversation and getting the jist of what was going on), said in her facetious way "I hope y'all ain' in Africa killing black people". We laughed at another example of adults just not getting our video games and explained to her what was going on, but I now think a part of her, even subconsciously, was weirded out by the notion of going into a village and disrupting the villagers' lives with our own selfish needs and superior technology, treating them like signficantly less advanced and capable than we (which, of course, they were) and generally recreating some of the kinds of things that both our African foreparents and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas definitely went through. R.I.P. Aunty Mar.

this one drew in a different crowd. i particularly love the "you're thinking about this too deeply" comments like... welcome lmao

I love the new Folding Ideas gimmick of him playing video games and ruining them for everybody, by applying the regular societal logic we live in.

"What if slavery, but with Squidwards?"

I always hated how, when you try to displace the villagers but don't put them far enough away, they run back to the others. They actively flee if you accidentally let them out of the cart/boat. They want to get back to their village. That's in part why i never really did that. I felt like if they wanted to be in their village, I should leave them there. Also, I love tending to my own little farm, and hate trading or having others do it instead.

"It's worth noting that there is not one where the player reclaims a planet from the extractors, balancing wetlands and ecosystems" There is now; it's called Terra Nil.

god i would love a game where i was retaking a world from the people trying to change it by balancing swamp ecosystems wtf

Ah yes, like that time Dwarf Fortress accidentally incentivized systematically breeding and slaughtering mermaids because their bones were among the most valuable renewable resources in the game. This was an outcome so repulsive to Toady One - the game's creator - that he would then go on to make mermaid bones nearly worthless to disincentivize such behavior in the future.

This is the same as killing homeless people in genshin. Like my first thought as someone from an ex-british colony was- "Wait a second, I'm the outsider here. Why am I killing the homeless people for loot?"

Hahaha you built a village for them? My friends and I simply enslaved them into some interconnected stalls in a cliffside.

Love how as you're discussing what is essentially the triangle trade, you are boating along a river banked by loads of sugar cane.... nice touch if deliberate

The fact that this begins with a story about a love of cats is super meaningful to me

I think most people make jokes about the cruelty of what they're doing in Minecraft while they do it. Even I feel bad sometimes uprooting the nice, quaint village and placing them all in a big stone box to breed and trade. I think it definitely does touch on something real world because I find myself trying to make the living space 'nicer', and then I have to question why I care so much about these pixel block people. Especially when you enter the trade chamber during certain hours of the Minecraft day and the villagers, still on their regular programmed behavior tracks, all head for the door because this is the time of day they would all congregate in the town square to trade, if they were free. You've disrupted this practice as a part of their day without wondering why they do it.

I get where you're coming from with this and I do think it's a significant aspect of the human psyche to delve into, especially with the environmental catastrophes of today, but I feel you perhaps played a little too much into the dichotomy of the coloniser and the 'noble savage' when discussing the societal influences driving your interests in building and terraforming. Indigenous and colonised peoples around the world heavy shaped our homes and exerted control on the environment- obviously not to the extent of colonial nations- and this line of thinking that Indigenous peoples are pure and naturalistic is a harmful one that paints us as inherently primal and anti-development. Surely you've heard of Rapa Nui, or First Nations in NA that used fire to reform landscapes, or the great Central American nations. The zoo in Tenochtitlan was the largest of its kind anywhere in the world, by some measures the largest in history, and I can't think of a more overt assertion of control over the environment than a zoo on that scale. I think in downplaying the enormous construction achievements and terraforming of Indigenous peoples, it's playing a bit too much into the views of Indigenous as some primal oddity off to the side. Just something to think on, but I do love the idea of examining why we love building/terraforming games in this way and layering it over with your accidental colonisation is a great way to break into it.

The little grumble noise the villager makes as you boat him away is...uncomfortable.

You know my first thought was, "Why don't you just make a nether highway to the village instead of kidnapping them? It's a lot easier anyway." Then I guess it becomes a Globalism metaphor instead.

I attempted some villager-napping of my own once back in 2019, and was attacked by a patrol of pillagers mere blocks out of the village, they slaughtered both me and the innocent villager. I was so consumed by guilt that I immediately gave up on my plans and decided to just make a clear path to the closest village I could find and resign myself to some walking. I held a mini funeral attended by me and a curious sheep, and planted a memorial tree and a rosebush. Haven't tried to kidnap a villager since.

Oh, colonialism and inhumane industrialization in Minecraft? *cackles in Dwarf Fortress*

I always felt like Factorio leaned into the whole colonialism thing instead of shying away from it. To me the overall tone says "Colonialism bad, here's a game where you are a bad guy doing colonialism."

Never had I ever faced the uncomfortable legacy of colonialism then when I was playing Civ V and stumbled onto a continent that had no civs or city states spawn on it, just barbarian camps. I was wiping out camps left and right until I went, "wait a minute...." haha

"My interests and values are authentic, but they didn't form un a vacuum." What an excellent observation. I'm going to be mulling that over for a good, long while.....

The sandbox game "Eco" does some interesting things; you're tasked with preventing a meteor from striking the planet's surface, starting from the same "punch trees to get wood" conditions of minecraft - but the ecosystem and climate are simulated also. Over-hunting animals can destabilise the population, over-farming can dry the soil of its nutrients, and burning coal and refining metals can poison the air, water, and soil. It's a delicate balancing act - saving the world, both from outer space and yourselves. It's super interesting!

Can't you make villagers by going to the river, sculpting people out of clay, writing the Hebrew word for truth on their foreheads, and walking around them clockwise three times, while intoning the true name of God?

I think there is some moral value in having this kind of choice, especially in the outcomes it gives you. Most morals in video games come down to “shoot the old lady? yes/no,” where “yes” only gets the player arrested. But that’s not how morals typically function in real life; people don’t do evil things for the hell of it, they usually do it for money, or some other clear advantage. Minecraft has an unusual number of mechanics that can be abused immorally, such as colonialism, factory farming, mass-murder, deforestation, etc. These are often difficult to do, but are clearly beneficial, at a moral cost the game makes very obvious (most mobs have a “cutesy” design, and scream when killed, and most can easily be beaten). Although some of the societal parallels the game has are unfortunate, it gives you a hidden choice. Play the game at face value, and respect the presence of others, or slaughter and enslave to progress faster, and be left with a dead world and a monument to your own narcissism.

Villager kid: Where did mama go? Villager Dad: She got pushed into a boat and will never come back cause some dude wanted more pet cats. Are you satisfied now, algorithm?!

I live nomadicly in minecraft. And god there is nothing greater then becoming intimate with the world by memory.

This video is such a prime example of how reflecting on the meaning/messaging of media is not NECESSARILY == condemning that media. Well done. Anecdotally, when I started Minecraft in 2015 I had NO IDEA how the game worked, I'd harvest blocks carefully for fear that a cave might collapse if I mined too much. And when I first found Iron ore, I thought, "What is this weird block?" and intentionally left some behind to preserve the memory of where I'd seen it for the first time. Now of course I know "better", but because of my nostalgia for that early experience (and perhaps a smattering of OCD), I still choose to play the game this way, striving to augment the environments I come across. Like, I'll mine a vein of coal but also place cobblestone slabs and stairs -blocks that don't naturally occur in caves- in such a way that they look like rubble in the void where the coal once was; I'll mimic the oak supports of an abandoned mineshaft; I'll make it LOOK like there was a mine here. Manipulating the environment to tell a story. That's just one example. I've done similar things in Ocean Monuments, ravines, and villages. Of course it slows my progress, but OTOH, I've been doing this in the same world for 4 years, and I explore a LOT, often getting lost on purpose and even being forced to make new bases, so that I tend to forget about things I've done previously... every now and then I come across such a thing from my past, and the passage of time being what it is, it feels almost like discovering something made by someone else. I love that Minecraft allows for this sort of world-building.

One of my favourite things to do in minecraft, even before the trading update, was to find an existing village, wall it off so zombies couldnt get in and kill the villagers, and just expand the village. There was something quant about having your little square with the villagers that you could decorate and make peaceful.

He makes it seem as if creating a village is unintended/insanely difficult by spelling out every step to make a village from curing villagers, when 99% are part of the natural progression of the game, EG: raiding nether fortress, creating potion and obtaining golden apples. 1 of which is needed to complete the game, and the other 2 greatly trivialise boss fights.

Based on all this, I think the sandbox exploration genre is ripe for its own version of Spec Ops: The Line.

This made me feel both less bad and more bad about just raiding villages for their resources.

Remember, games are art, until you say something I don't like about them. Then, it's just a game! Don't overthink it!

you were just bringing those villagers "freedom" and "democracy"

While I do appreciate the overall sentiment and agree with the video both in general and most of the specifics, what is interesting to me as someone who is somewhat outside of the European perspective of history, is that you automatically think about the European colonization when looking at these games which is in itself a type of eurocentrism. Remember that all places in the world were once pristine nature untouched by man. Until someone came to that land to colonize it. Is it illegitimate to say that those people who first arrived in the Americas thousands of years ago had once gone through many of the same processes that we see in these sorts of games? I don't think so. Saying otherwise denies that they attempted to create, to master their environment or build complex infrastructure with the resources at their disposal. It sort of denies the idea that the colonized people were societies as we tend to think of them. After all, "what if America, but without native Americans" was what the native Americans got to experience when they began colonizing America.

It's funny. I generally start my runs with Minecraft looking for a viable village to start improving before I go about doing anything else. Then I trek outward looking for neighboring villages and points of interest. After which I begin to build outward from the initial village, roads, rail systems, etc. to connect the surrounding villages together. I pretty much never move villagers with boats or mine carts. I just build them new nicer homes, and more farms and work sites, storage, docks, etc. and give them free bread and trade with them to level them up. I like to pretend I'm building a friendly utopian anarcho-syndicalist or some sort of socialist society. haha.

"Huh!!!!!!!" - the cry of a marginalized Minecraft villager.

A Dark Room is a construction/exploration game that directly addresses the colonialism of the protagonist

“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.” -Collected sayings of Muad'Dib, by the Princess Irulan

In my experience, most of the Factorio community acknowledges that you basically play the villain. The most telling part is when they removed the resource dropped by alien bases that's essential for researching the final rocket. Now there's literally no benefit to displacing the natives... but you do it anyway. Because even though the oil well by my spawn point can be used forever (albeit slowly), what if I want MORE oil?

It's not a sandbox game, but isn't "reclaiming the land from a rampaging industrialist" the plot of Kirby Planet Robobot?

You do also have the option of, you know, not kidnapping, if it bothers you that much.

I remember that the world I made with my siblings had a weird rule where we would always replace all trees we cut down with saplings to preserve the natural resources.

This comment section bothers me so much. Everyone needs to chill. He didn't say that this was an issue that needs to be resolved. It's an observation. Just because this undertone exists, that doesn't mean that you are the equivalent of a European colonizer. That doesn't mean that minecraft is a bad, or violent, or a racist video game. But just because it is a video game, that doesn't mean that this discussion isn't worth having. Minecraft players need to remember that an examination of minecraft is not an personal examination of their character. It is true, however that this video began to focus on the ideas of civilization as a whole and not just colonization. But the villager immigration thing is definitely colonialism. The tone of this video was kind of dark due to the lack of music. I'm sorry, but a mostly neutral voice with (almost) nothing to accompany it gives off a tone of emptiness. Overall I loved the editing and content though! Great and thoughtful video.

Ok andrew jackson, blaming minecraft for your recreation of the trail of tears

Stardew explicitly focuses on joining an existing community and benefiting it. Sure you can take the capitalist exploit route, but that makes you a douche. Being on a equal level to the NPCs is not only less of an unfortunate implication, it's also more engaging for roleplay.

I imagine myself as an actual feudal lord when I play Minecraft. I embrace the fact that the player character isn't necessarily a good person, they're a settling and conquering nomad with capabilities similar to a demigod compared to the other inhabitants. I don't know if engaging in evil acts in a fictionalized setting is necessarily evil or unvirtuous if it's done critically, in fact it can have a good outcome if you take a step back and realize what systems incentivize your behavior to act as 'the bad guy' when you're just playing the game and then take that knowledge to prevent yourself from doing that outside of a virtual space, where the people you interact with aren't NPCs with the most basic encoded instructions and are instead actual sentient beings with moral consideration.

I'm not sure... while I definitely see your points regarding colonialism and the appeal of taming the wilderness, isn't taming the wilderness more of a... civilization.. thing? Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, The ancient south american natives, and many others.. Human Civilization started when our ancestors, thousands of years ago, managed to obtain a mastery over the environment around them. The invention of agriculture, the domestication of animals, the invention of bricks and mortar... These are all examples of humans controlling nature in order to benefit their lives. I don't think these things are inherently colonialist in origin or nature. Sure, the specifics varied from region to region, with cultures in Asia and Europe developing an idea of private property and ownership of the land, while cultures in North America shared nature, but didn't own it. But be it a nomadic village's tents, or a huge stone pyramid, humans build. It is what we do. It is what has defined our culture for thousands of years. Colonial or not.

it really doesn't help that your server is shaped like western europe

I just wish Minecraft had systems (or at least a mod) that made biomes less static and more interactive. For instance, it would be cool if the kinds and amounts of animals in a region changed depending on what you did there, like maybe cutting down trees could reduce the amounts of chickens as they disperse for more cover, or maybe there could be different qualities of soil or something. Waste systems too, so you have to actually consider your footprint.

last remaining villager after i tnt the entire village in superflat creative: "hmmmm"

I remember selling weed to villagers back in 1.7.2(?) Long time ago.

There is an inverse factorio, known as terra nil, where the player must repair an industrial hellscape and terraform the planet back into something resembling nature.

Taken further, you need to somehow keep your villagers safe from threats they face in the world to protect your investment in those few high level villagers with the dope items for sale. To do this, you fashion shelters for them, which take the form of increasingly restrictive spaces. Eventually you arrive at the logical conclusion where your villagers, now sequestered into their prisons designed expressly for your convenience, toil endlessly not for their own fulfillment, but yours.

"I'm not your dad." You don't have to rub it in.

Apparently I was playing minecraft wrong when I randomly decided it was my job to protect the villages from monsters and give ALL the villagers exactly what they wanted. Honestly, it felt good to finally trade those two emeralds for a feather.

I was watching a Minecraft playthrough where the streamer was looking around for a place to settle down. They found a spot they liked and started talking about all of the plans they had for the area. One of those plans was to terraform an existing depression in the terrain into an entirely new lake. This depression happened to be the location of a village. There are certain historical parallels here that immediately jumped to mind. Later in the same video, the streamer was talking about the importance of keeping villagers safe from hostile mobs. A task he accomplished by digging basements under the villager's homes, pushing them in, and then making it impossible to leave. My point is that Minecraft isn't exactly a great vehicle for teaching players about ethics...

My question is: Instead of doing all that stuff to abduct villagers Why not just build a railway to the village?

Good insights with the villagers, but there’s a moment where the idea of wealth extraction gets conflated with construction. One is colonialism, the other is civilization, which a lot of “the colonized” actually had.

How dare you drop the following 12ish minutes of this on me right after the shock of finding out you aren't my dad.

Minecraft actually has a bit of an organic moral choice system. You can get villagers the good way (curing zombies), but it's really hard. You can also do it the evil way (kidnapping), and it's relatively easy. There's nothing wrong with this system. In the real world, evil doesn't come from a desire to do harm. It's not caused by wickedness or cruelty, these are just symptoms. Evil comes from laziness. It comes from optimizing the wrong things. It comes from truly not caring about the factors that matter. Being good takes hard work. And why bother being good when being bad is so much easier? You didn't really care about the villagers, only their stuff. So this is what you did.

Sonic the Hedgehog is a game about reclaiming nature from an industrialist. The hero gamers do not want, but deserve.

perfect demonstration of how systems insentivize behaviours.

Please do this type of analysis with the Sims.

"Death of the author." I'm pretty sure that you have a point as to the cultural programming inherent in such ideas as "taming the wilderness", but I believe that this is more a personal I interpretation more unique to yourself and your area of expertise. We see what we expect to see, and what we see is simply a reflection of ourselves. I think that you're overreaching insofar as you extrapolate that these ideas are more prevalent then far more innocent ones. The natives hunted and gathered, farmers used agriculture, and EVERYONE has a Home. "Taming the wilderness" is less about exploitation of "the natives", and is more about being a native of the land. Throw monetary incentives and player-based transactions for villager-geschtant, and then we're undoubtably on the level of colonialism. I just think that...this is a little too..."what have we done!?". Rather then, "Neat! I think I've found some subtle buried colonialism ideals in western ideas about surviving outdoors!"

I dunno how Minecraft swung around to become so favorable for the algorithm again, but it was worth it to get this video, what a banger.

Jules Skotnes-Brown seems to be in a 'if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail' situation

I feel like this video kinda disregards the idea that "settling" a location, making it "safe", making it "home" is an impulse intrinsic to pretty much every living thing on the planet. Life is easier when your environment is engineered to fit one's needs as opposed to adapting yourself to an environment that can shift at any moment. Idk, kinda feels unproductive to tie what could easily be an extrapolation of a basic nesting impulse to...y'know, one of the greatest atrocities the world's ever seen. ...not that this has anything to do with the villager thing that the videos primarily about...yeah...yeah, ain't much excuse for that, specifically. Edit: Word Correction

Finally, a video that explains why I choose to characterize myself as an greedy, capricious overlord when I play Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress

this made me think about the sims games and how everybody I ever met who played it mainly played it to kill people in intricate ways

I really appreciate the absolute wit and comedy in this video's script and editing that exists without undermining the overall fascinating and well-rounded essay. Extremely engaging video.

Maybe we should ask the ones who get to be enslaved? Minecraft villagers: Hmmm...

Every villager must be deported into one great city and submit to the Roman Catholic Church

Actually you've got me thinking, and I'd quite enjoy playing a game where I manipulate ecosystems. Designing species, taking out food chain jenga pieces to see what happens and fixing the consequences... Sounds fun.

A reclaim the land and rebuild the ecosystem game does sound super fun though, and I would play that

“And you give the cat fish, until _it_ adopts _you_ ..” This is so true XDXD

Welp just when I finished walling off a village, creating a few more iron golem, building my castle in the middle of the village square, and establishing a mining operation+farmland right on the border. Oops indeed lol

I was playing a Minecraft earth server hosted by a friend of a friend and in a get rich quick scheme to gain power in the servers economy we ended up sailing villagers from Quebec to southern China. It was as we drifted in the ocean that I saw the parallels between our actions an colonialism